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I've always had "AHA!"-moments when encountering new concepts or ideas in programming.
That's when things start clicking for me.
And I think I haven't yet had that moment with Emacs/Emacs Lisp yet.
Or for that matter, is there even one?

For example:
Object-Oriented Programming
"AHA! I can make my own types that behave just like regular types!"

Functional Programming
"AHA! I can divide every everything into functions!"

John DeBord
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  • This question and potential answer are opinion based, and the question should be closed for that reason. People on reddit/emacs love this type of discussion. Here, however, is questions with specific answers. When you have a specific question that has a potential concrete answer, please feel free to make an additional post. That being said, I've used Emacs for 5 years and extensively modified/customized the Lisp components and also some of the C internals ... AHA! moments come little by little and will likely keep coming as such for the rest of my life .... – lawlist Mar 30 '18 at 04:27
  • Emacs Lisp is backwards compared to more modern lisp dialects like Clojure or even Common Lisp. It lacks namespaces and didn't even have lexical scoping until relatively recently (and it's still not even enabled by default). It is still *lisp* though, and you can still do things with macros that are not possible at all in non-lisp languages. That being said, the only real reason to use Emacs Lisp is to customize Emacs. The language is nothing special compared to other lisp dialects. – Qudit Mar 30 '18 at 06:32

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There is nothing particularly “special” about Emacs lisp. It’s more about understanding lisp in general. For me it really clicked when I understood things like homoiconicity, and the power of macros. This allows you to create new syntax whenever needed and can let you easily prototype new language features, like lexical bindings, before they are officially supported. This web comic (I have not read the book) helped expose me to some of the lisp concepts.

Prgrm.celeritas
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  • The book is great to new comers, BTW. I already read it all in past, really nice book to start into Lisp world, very fun and informational. Not complete, as always a novice book is, but awesome to take later more paths to get into deep Lisp learning. – Manoel Vilela Mar 30 '18 at 06:50